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Stirling's Early-Modern Gardens

17/11/2013

 
Saturday 16th Nov was the annual Forth Naturalist and Historian Conference. This year, with the focus on wildlife, it drew the biggest audience for several years. But the focus was also on change, particularly over the last 40 years or so, since the journal Forth Naturalist and Historian, began to appear. And, in that sense, all the papers were historical. I found it fascinating to see detailed examples of how human activities impact in such different ways on a wide variety of taxa and species.

The event also saw the launch of Volume 36 of Forth Naturalist and Historian which includes a paper I have intended to write for years on Stirling's early-modern gardeners and their gardens.

It starts by discussing what gardens (very valuable assets in the 17th and 18th centuries) can reveal about the development of the town plan. But most of the paper is devoted to the produce - fruit and vegetables, salads, herbs and such important incidentals as honey and wax from bees; and there were also flowers so that, though most gardens were utilitarian, there was also an element of delight.

Perhaps surprisingly, many of the best-documented gardens were commercial enterprises run by 'market gardeners' who probably managed several gardens at the same time.

Of course, the journal includes many other papers, including Digney and Jones on the recent survey work at the King's Knot. the history of botanical discoveries at Ben Lawers and an interesting item on prehistoric pottery found in the King's Park earlier this year; there are also some intriguing looking wildlife papers.


It usually takes a week or two for copies of the journal (£10) to be distributed to the University bookshop and the Smith Museum.
For details see the website; http://www.fnh.stir.ac.uk/journal/index.php



Picture
Gravestone of John Simpson, gardener, one of those discussed in the paper.

New tenements paper published

11/11/2013

 
Picture
It's always (well, almost always) a relief to finally see a long-term project come to fruition in print. And this week it was a real pleasure to get the final version of my latest paper.
'Houses in Early Modern Stirling: Some Documentary Evidence', published Review of Scottish Culture, volume 25 (2013) p. 42-59, really is the fruit if 'years of work'.
It is astonishing how much detail about the structure and internal arrangements of early modern tenements and town houses survives in the archives. It was when I was asked to speak at the English Vernacular Architecture Group some years ago, that I realised how little systematic information was in print. So I decided to do some extra work to supplement my old notes. And this paper is the outcome.

There are few surviving upstanding examples of 16th to early 18th century tenements, archaeology has often been destroyed and is not really applicable above ground level and photographs of facades tell is little about the internal spaces, where the people actually lived. That is why the information from the archives is so helpful. And I hope that this paper will be a useful supplement to earlier work. To some extent, indeed, it gets us off the ground and behind the facades, looking at the real spaces that real people occupied (halls, chambers, kitchens, lofts, wardrobes, vaults and all).




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    John G Harrison is a historian, working on a wide range of topics related to Scottish history, from architecture to wildlife. Take a scroll through the site to find out more. And feel free to contact John or to comment via the blog.

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